


How to Make a Ghost

by eudaimon



Category: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 07:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Abe's death, Henry has nothing to keep him in America, but he still has a long road ahead of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Make a Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fyre](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fyre/gifts).



> Henry is BY FAR my favourite character in the movie. I know that, in your additional details, you said that you weren't interested in book!canon, but I couldn't resist a few touches.
> 
> I hope that you enjoy this. Happy Yuletide! ♥

_1865_ :

The problem is this: being interesting isn’t enough to save him, in the end. Being strong and clever and _good_ isn’t enough, either. Bullets are no respecter of status or goodness or the weight of stories. Suddenly, Henry finds himself existing in a void – no Adam but no Abe either. So now what’s he supposed to do? 

It’s been a long time since had had nothing on his mind but time. 

The diary helps; it makes it feel like Abe is still present. Packing up to leave, Henry stows it carefully in a trunk, along with a silver fork so bent out of shape as to be almost unrecognisable, monogrammed AL. It’s been a long time since he’s even thought about leaving America – it would have been so irresponsible, in the face of war. But now the war is over and all he has is time. He thinks about putting a match to the old house in Kentucky, but there’s nothing there, really, and it isn’t as though it matters. He doesn’t intend to ever set another foot there, not into that hallway, not now the world lays open in front of him like a door. 

One thing about life, though: it does go on.

*

_1900_ :

London is far from how he remembers it. The sky is choked with smoke and the buildings creep on, ever upward. In that respect, at least, it reminds him of New York. It feels dangerous, like a place with teeth. Every so often, he catches glimpses of his own kind; they move as shadows in the corners of his eyes. Style over substance, these European vampires (he knows that he was born on these same shores, but it might as well have been a different world). He still favours the clothes that he always has – the patterned waistcoats, the well cut coats. Let them keep their form-fitted black. He knows how to make himself a ghost.

She looks innocent, but he knows that’s not the case. Long ago, he made a deal with the universe, to help him justify the things that he has done. No children, no sick (unless they ask for it), no ones who’ve done no harm. It’s been easier some years than others, but what Henry’s always known is that Adam was right when he questioned the purity of Henry’s heart. And, more than anything, he wants to believe that Edeva is still watching him, still loving him, and that she won’t entirely hate what it is that he’s become. He hopes that she’ll recognise that he’s done his best in the face of great trials.

The girl that he’s following pauses at a corner. There’s no blood on her hands, but he can smell it on her. The money that she’s stolen lies heavy in one pocket – heavy as the bodies going cold in the house that he followed her from. There was nothing that he could do for them, but would he have stopped if there had been?

Irrelevant. Not worth pondering.

It might never have occurred to her that, one day, she might too be prey. It almost never occurs to them. They thing that they’re alpha predators; they’re convinced that there’s nothing that can touch them.

Fools.

At the last moment, she turns to face him. She’s pretty enough, he supposes. For the first time in years, he thinks of Gabrielle, the girl he was fucking the morning that he first had a proper conversation with young Abraham Lincoln. She was pretty enough – beautiful tits, but a brain too. He’d liked her. So rarely did he meet someone he could fuck and have a conversation with at the same time.

“Hello, handsome,” she says, grinning and showing a mouth full of sharp, white teeth.   
But not nearly sharp enough.

 

*

_1940_ :

War makes monsters of ordinary men. He fits right in. In a snowy forest, they huddle in fox-holes and there are no atheists in sight, not one. Now, mostly, he picks off the wounded – the boys who lie in their blankets begging for release. He sits with them for a while. He doesn’t remember many prayers. 

But he does his best.

In an old church, half undone by bombs, he sits and holds a trembling hand. There’s something about this boy that reminds him of Abe when they first met – tall, raw-boned, earnest and open in the worst possible way. Henry wants to warn him, wants to list all of the many possible ways that the world can hurt. But he doesn’t, because what could be the point. He sits there and he listens to tales of the Midwest farm-land, open skies and he pretends that he can’t smell the blood under the skin, all but taste the pulse on his tongue.

(The end, when it comes, is quiet. He bites as gently as he knows how, drinks until the regular thumping of the heart is as soft as a whisper in his ear. He closes the eyes with a brush of his fingers. He tries to remember a prayer but can only come up with poetry instead.

_Being damned, I am amused to see the centre of love diffused and the wave of love travel into vacancy._

And the war goes on.  
Some days, it feels forever. Even with all of that time to give him context, the road is long.

*

_1968_ :

He pauses at the back of a crowd and watches history in the making. Everything stops, suddenly, violently, but history continues.

He considers intervening, but it’s the thought of Abe that stops him.  
Because he’s not sure that he could do that twice. No matter how interesting. No matter how good.

No matter how the world might change.

*  
 _1995_ :  
He finds himself at the memorial, usually in the dead of night. He doesn’t know why – it’s not like Abe’s bones are there. If he wanted to spend time with Abe himself, he’d make the journey back to Springfield and sit at his tomb for a while (such a vast thing for what, in the end, was just a little pile of bones – not nearly enough to represent so great a man as Abraham Lincoln was. History has remembered him kindly but still not found his true likeness).

Henry likes the memorial, though. They built it on such a grand scale, celebrating only a fraction of what he was - if only they knew the truth, it would be as tall as mountains. But what was it that Abe wrote? That history remembers the battle but forgets the blood.

And there has been so much blood.

Henry likes the memorial, but it isn’t enough, not by a long, long way.  
But how could it be?

They could have built it to the sky, and it still would barely have been enough to contain him.

*

_2012_ :

_Write it down_ , he says. _Write it however you want, but make sure you tell the truth._  
What about him? What about Henry Sturges?

It doesn’t matter. It never did.  
The world is wide and, anyway, the poet was right – it’s so easy to make a ghost.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem that Henry quotes in place of a prayer is "How to Kill" by Keith Douglas. The title is also taken from that work.


End file.
